Kelly Bulkeley

Kelly Bulkeley, Ph.D., is a psychologist of religion focusing on dreams.  He is Director of the Sleep and Dream Database (SDDb) and the Dream Library Foundation and a Senior Editor of the APA journal Dreaming.  His books include The Spirit of Dreaming in Shakespeare (in press), The Scribes of Sleep (2023), Escape from Mercury (2022), Lucrecia the Dreamer (2018), Big Dreams (2016), Dreaming in the World’s Religions (2008), Dreaming Beyond Death (2007), and The Wilderness of Dreams (1994). He lives in Estacada, Oregon.

Why I do what I do

The earliest sign that I might veer off from the path of conventional life came in fifth grade, when I was about eleven years old. My teacher had assigned our class a special writing project of two or three pages on any topic we liked, and a friend and I co-wrote a twenty-page paper on the history of horror movies. We analyzed the classic films of Western horror by decade (1920s–1960s), profiled the top actors, and ranked the movies in various categories. Something definitely clicked, and I can now see how my passion for research and writing was kindled by this project. I can also understand what I found so compelling about the subject of scary movies. The top three films in my eleven-year-old pantheon of cinematic horror were Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), and King Kong (1933)—all appearing just before the imposition of the Hays Code in 1934, which strictly prohibited “vulgarity and suggestiveness” in American movies for the next thirty years. I had no idea about that at the time, of course, but I definitely sensed in my top three an opening into a realm of forbidden insights and uncanny truths. Other people seemed to find movies like that disturbing and scary, but I was intuitively drawn to them and wanted to explore them in more depth. More than fifty years later, having devoted a goodly portion of my life to the study of dreams, I remain tremendously intrigued and inspired by weird film-making.